Last year began with the Women’s March and closed with scores of female accusers coming forward and ending the careers of the powerful men who had harassed and assaulted them. If movies had failed to present female characters who matched the dynamic, fearless women who dominated the news throughout 2017, Hollywood might have needed to cancel awards season as an act of cultural penance.

Thank goodness, then, that some of the best Oscar-nominated films of this season overflowed with fascinating, indelible women (despite the fact that many of the movies had been written by men, an ironic imbalance that will likely take several more years of activism to fully rectify). There were triumphant feminist heroines, complex romantic leads, and one all-time-great villain. The hoary term “strong female character” has never seemed less useful; these women were powerful and weak, determined and indecisive, endearing and irritating—often all at once.

Take the two main female characters in Mudbound, which writer-director Dee Rees adapted from a screenplay by Virgil Williams (based on Hillary Jordan’s book) to be a story of two families, one white and one black, scraping by on a Mississippi farm. Laura and Florence, played by Carey Mulligan and Mary J. Blige, respectively, strike up an uneasy working relationship when Florence begins caring for Laura’s children. “Each believes the other has power over her, and it’s true in a way,” Rees said. “For Laura, she feels that Florence has the power because [she] has the power to heal. Even though Florence doesn’t have a choice of participating in that situation, she still has the power of her know-how. And then Laura has the power of her whiteness. To me that was the core of the relationship, everything was about the bartering of power.”

In one of the film’s many striking scenes, Laura seeks comfort from Florence after having a miscarriage; Florence lets Laura hug her but is visibly emotionally removed. “Florence is very sober about the fact that, just because they’re having a moment, it doesn’t mean that Laura is ever going to think of her truly as an equal,” Rees said. Particularly in this period in the Jim Crow South, Rees noted, “there’s danger in over-familiarity, and that’s how you die, when you become too close or assume too much.”

Rees wove into the script stories about her own grandparents, including one specific superstition that comes to life in the film when Florence’s oldest son is deployed to Europe to fight in World War II. “In the book, Florence is written as this overly superstitious person, and I wanted to trim that back and give her something that felt honest to me,” Rees said. “My paternal grandmother thought it was bad luck to watch people leave, and that’s why I gave Florence that.”

There is no screenwriter this year closer to her central character than Emily V. Gordon, who, with her husband, Kumail Nanjiani, wrote the romantic comedy The Big Sick, based on their real love story and the medical crisis that left Emily in a coma. The couple had the challenge of turning their personal history into a three-act comedy, without reducing either character to a familiar rom-com trope. “Especially with female characters, it’s easy to be, like, she’s sassy or very smart, but people are kind of everything all at once,” Nanjiani said. “We really wanted to do that with Emily. Especially because she disappears for half the movie, she has to feel real enough and contradictory enough and messy enough that you feel her presence even though she’s not there.”

The revealing introduction to Emily’s character, though, required Nanjiani and Gordon to re-write their real history. “In the scene when he writes her name in Urdu on the napkin, and she calls him out on it being a move, in real life I fell for it hook, line, and sinker,” Gordon admitted. “We could have kept it that way, but that for me felt like a different movie, not a movie where people are wanting to challenge each other. And that is how we were in reality, but in that moment in reality I fell for it.”

The love story in The Big Sick may be fairly unconventional, but no romance clears the same kind of hurdles as The Shape of Water, which casts Sally Hawkins as a mute woman who falls in love with a sea creature (Doug Jones) and communicates with him through glances, dancing, a shared love of hard-boiled eggs, and eventually sign language. Vanessa Taylor, who began working on the script from an idea by director Guillermo del Toro, said that Hawkins’s character’s being mute “gave us more latitude. She was a mysterious character because she wasn’t filling in all these details herself, and I thought that was kind of necessary for the fairy tale.”

Hawkins was already cast when Taylor began. “I knew she wasn’t going to need too many words at all,” Taylor said. But she and del Toro bolstered the central love story by populating the film with side characters, such as Octavia Spencer’s Zelda and Michael Shannon’s villainous Strickland, who talk a lot. “People are talking all the time, and so much of their talk is just not important at all. These two people who are completely silent are what’s really going on,” Taylor said. “To me, it was the purity of a love story that can be expressed without words.”

Though Greta Gerwig wrote Lady Bird with a heavy dose of inspiration from her own high-school experience, she was getting nowhere with the central character until two lines suddenly hit her: “Why won’t you call me Lady Bird? You said you would.” From there, Gerwig recalled, the character “just kept coming back for more, even though I was partially thinking this was the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever written.”

Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan), a 17-year-old who acts impulsively and sometimes cruelly to the people who love her, is not always likable. But neither is her central antagonist, her mother, Marion (played by Laurie Metcalf), who clearly loves her daughter but can’t resist tearing her down, either. For Gerwig, the balance between the characters was about “making sure that neither one of them felt like I was selling them out, or that I was crucifying them or making them seem perfect. For me, for the love to work, I needed the conflict to work.”

And when the love was not evident enough, perhaps, Gerwig knew that a sense of humor—for Lady Bird and for all her characters—could bridge the gap. “It’s sort of the oldest trick in the book,” she said. “Being funny allows you to do some stuff that you would ordinarily think was insufferable.”

Black comedy has infiltrated all of Martin McDonagh’s films, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is no different. “That’s naturally how I write—it’s always kind of comedic,” he said. But with his lead character, Mildred, played by Frances McDormand, his goal was not to let her sense of humor excuse the sometimes ruthless actions she takes when seeking justice for her murdered daughter. “We’ve seen films or characters where, even if it’s a tough woman, she’s allowed to be either mothering or gentle in certain scenes. We literally didn’t want to let the audience off the hook.”

Having made his first two feature films, In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths, both primarily about male characters, McDonagh wanted to write a female lead for Three Billboards as a way to “flex that muscle and see if I could even do it like I used to be able to,” referring to his early plays with female leads, such as The Beauty Queen of Leenane. Though his heroine, Mildred, is driven by raw anger and grief, he says writing her was “joyful.” “There was something very freeing about it once I got down to it, especially a character as strong as Mildred. It wasn’t just a strong female lead; it was an outrageous one.”

There may be no more outrageous female character, though, than the one Allison Williams plays in Jordan Peele’s Get Out. Rose is a white twentysomething who has brought her black boyfriend, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), to the suffocating suburbs. Neither Chris nor the audience knows that he is meant to become a human sacrifice. Like Mildred and Lady Bird, Rose is funny, and her shared sense of humor with Chris—something Peele based on the rapport between Williams and Kaluuya—makes the relationship “something that the audience could get behind and root for.”

In early drafts Rose was “a little bit closer to John Cassavetes’s character in Rosemary’s Baby: The audience is kind of let in to the fact that [he’s] up to no good in subtle ways from the very beginning.” But then, Peele realized, “if you can pull a Keyser Söze”—referring to the twist character reveal in 1995’s The Usual Suspects—“why would you not pull a Keyser Söze.”

Peele used the tropes of the horror genre to hide Rose’s true villainy. “Plain and simple, people do not think that you can allow the one good white character to also be evil,” he said. But he also developed her even further as a potential heroine, showing her frustrated awakening to the racism in her own family—a reversal of an original scene in which she comforted Chris, who is becoming increasingly concerned. “That swap allowed the audience, who knows we’re headed somewhere dark, to be thankful for the Rose character,” Peele said. “She’s clueing in to something’s not right, and it helps mask the fact that she’s evil.”

Rose is utterly unlike the real heroic women we celebrated in 2017, or even the more complicated ones who inspired Oscar-nominated performances this year, such as Margot Robbie’s Tonya Harding (in I, Tonya) and Meryl Streep’s Katharine Graham (in The Post). But there is something appropriate about Williams’s presence in the most-talked-about film of the year, as someone who has been comfortable with her immense privilege for too long and suddenly has it taken away. There was no Keyser Söze–like reveal for the real-life villains of 2017—but, hey, that’s why we go to the movies.